Death of popular Happisburgh lay minister

A popular Lay Minister who has been serving the village of Happisburgh for more than 60 years has died at the age of 89.

Raymond Sanders has lived and preached for many years and loved the village life at Happisburgh, regularly serving at the local St Mary’s church. He was greatly respected by the community for his loyalty and support. He died peacefully at home with his wife, Margaret, at his side on May 19.

Mr Sanders was born in 1927 at St Giles, in Norwich and joined the choir, at St Mary’s, Earlham, in Norwich, aged eight. After leaving school at 14, he got a job and trained as an electrical engineer with Eastern Electricity. In 1945, aged 18, he was called-up to join the Navy as an electrician. They had two boys, Mark and Paul, who eventually studied at Oxford, followed with careers in teaching and accountancy. They also had four granddaughters - Dorothy, Ella, Zoe and Millie.

For the last few years, Mr Sanders was suffering from prostate cancer but insisted enjoying life to the full, stating often: “It can be done.” Last year he was nominated to receive the Queen’s Maundy Money by the Diocese, the Regional Church of England Authority and the Royal Maundy Service.

A service of thanksgiving was held at St Mary’s church, Happisburgh on Wednesday, June 7.

The photo of Raymond Sanders above is courtesy of Eastern Daily Press, where this article was first published.
For more on this story, with more pictures, visit EDP24.

Do you appreciate our service and stories?

The Network Norwich & Norfolk website has been published for over 13 years now and we have an established team of professional journalists covering the activities, organisations and churches which make up the county’s Christian community. Our whole purpose is to support that community by daily providing accurate, unbiased stories and features.

To pay for that service, we rely on our partner organisations, advertisers and readers to, in turn, support us financially. We want to keep the website free for everyone to access and continue to be able to pay for writers to produce the content you can enjoy every day.

We would like to ask you to consider supporting our work and suggest you might want to make a small regular donation of just £1 a week and become one of our 100 Friends, or a larger one-off or annual amount.

Because we are part of a registered charity we can reclaim Gift Aid on your donations if you are a tax-payer.